from Larry Pickering

Australian of the year Adam Goodes has decided to rubbish his own country (or should I say the white inhabitants of his own country) as an invited guest to the Ol’ Dart.

Racism is not a one way street yet he was happy to once again go against the traffic and display the same Aboriginal form of racism he did with that 13 year-old white girl during an AFL match against Collingwood.

I have worn a red and white No 4 jumper for most of my playing career in Canberra and for Sydney’s St George. I played my last game at full forward for the Woy Woy Swans at the age of 49.

After winning that premiership game my son Jamie, who had played in the centre with me for seven years, also retired.

That was the last game of footy my AFL mad dad watched before he died, so you could say I have an affection for the old South Melbourne Bloods.

An affection that was shattered when my hero Adam Goodes demanded that a little girl be removed from the MCG for calling him an ape.

Ever since that shameful day muted boos can be heard whenever Adam gets the ball.

He has not represented Australia nor his Aboriginal brothers well and those Aborigines who have graced the only uniquely Australian game for over a century did not rush to support him.

Well Adam, unlike you, I’m not “ashamed” to be Australian but I’ll play the sorry game too if you say sorry for the way your brothers left my great uncle to die a horrible death in red hot sand with a spear in his back.

You see, every country has been invaded, every country has suffered attempted colonisation by others, that’s the way this world evolved. And who knows who was here before Adam’s antecedents arrived.

I love Aborigines and their culture, I want to be proud of it, but I’m over this racist nonsense that is acceptable from one side only.

Australia was always going to be colonised, if not by the Brits then by the Dutch or Portuguese, and I doubt either would have been less brutal.

Okay, so this is where I get into trouble for telling the truth: For 60,000 years Aborigines did not attempt to improve this land and it was begging to be colonised by someone.

They planted no seeds, although there were plenty. They did not invent the wheel, although they walked huge distances. They did not discover numbers, although trade is a tribal imperative. They remained nomadic, although a rich 10,000-mile coastline was begging settlement.

And we wonder why voluminous amounts of money have not succeeded in “closing the gap”.

The “gap” will remain for generations to come because Aboriginal tribes were the least developed of any indigenes on earth. The “gap” was actually a grand canyon and we have never understood it.

We were as ruthlessly cruel to Aborigines as the Plymouth pilgrims were to the more developed American Indians and the Chinese are to the developed Tibetans, but it’s a price that is always paid by those with less sophisticated weapons.

Adam Goodes might be a monument to political correctness but he is an impediment to our hopes for assimilation.